Pinoy Penman

T3 Select Opinion for October 07


IN THE world of electronic gadgets (and what other world matters, pray tell?), there’s such a creature as a business phone. I have one—the Nokia E61i that I wrote about in this corner a couple of issues ago. Never mind, for the moment, how it works. I’d like to talk about how it looks—which, in today’s gallery of glitz and glam, isn’t much.

And that, I suspect, is precisely the point of the business phone: a device that usually comes in dark colors (black, gray, or in the E61i’s case, a grayish-brown “mocha”) with a streak or a swath of brushed metal. The idea is understatement, and what’s being (under)stated is, “I may not look splashy, but I do a lot, work hard, and earn big bucks for my owner—and I’m probably more expensive than you think.”

I thought about this when a professor-friend—who makes no bones about her preference for big beads and fancy jewelry—saw my phone over lunch a few weeks ago and appeared to be awed by its many-faceted talents (BlackBerry, wi-fi, VOIP, etc.), only to ask “But does it come in pink?”

She flashed me her Motorola V3 Razr in Magenta Pink to give me a hint of what she wanted. “No,” I said, slightly miffed that I would be thought capable of buying a phone with a pink option. “It’s a business phone, and it comes only in one color.” Just to be more congenial, I then added, “But you can change the wallpaper, and put all kinds of flowers and colors there,” even as I cringed from the very idea. My wallpaper, of course, was the original “Gray Dots” theme that resembles an, er, a solid wall of gray.

There are some basic things we should expect from a business phone: it should do e-mail, it should have a huge capacity for storing contacts, it should have all kinds of connectivity options, it should have a suite of office programs, and it should sync seamlessly with our laptops and desktops. And it should come in black or gray (or, okay, mocha) to convey the earnest seriousness of its owner. I mean, would you invest your life savings with someone waving a pink phone?

But, as it turns out, some of my conservatism rubbed off on my lady-friend, who yelled to me in the parking lot the other day to announce that she and her husband had decided to get themselves E61i’s, thanks to my demonstration of its capabilities. Ah, I thought, finally, some progress. And then she added, “And you know the first thing I found for it? A hot pink leather case!”

T3 Select Opinion for September 2007


ONE OF the things we most often take for granted in this digital life—at least until it’s too late—is the battery. The fact is that nearly nothing will run these days without a battery—not your cellphone, laptop, mp3 player, PDA, digicam, or Bluetooth headset, not to mention your car. With batteries come chargers, often thrice the size of the batteries themselves.

Being what I’d call a “redundancy freak,” I keep a small warehouse of spare batteries and chargers in my home, car, and office. Nothing burns me up more than a “low-batt” message in the middle of an important call or a vital shot. When I’m off on a long trip, I could be mistaken for a battery salesman, given all the little black bags and pouches I stash away in my luggage just to make sure I’ll never run out of juice.

It’s something I’m deeply unhappy about. I wish manufacturers would come up with a standard charger and charging port for all small electronics—maybe one for laptops and similarly sized appliances, and another one for smaller gadgets like cellphones and PDAs. I know, I know, there are all the interfaces and voltages to work out, and hell might freeze over before a Nokia charger can power up a Sony Ericsson.

But why the heck not? If these smart people can come up with an industry standard like USB—and yes, we now have all those USB chargers to thank for, although you’ll soon have a giant octopus of USB connections to deal with—why can’t they do the same thing on the portable power side?

On the other hand, I keep reminding myself and others that we shouldn’t be too obsessed about batteries and battery life. In a techie forum I help moderate (www.philmug.ph), newbies tend to devote unusual amounts of attention and angst to issues like battery capacity and load-cycles. Is it better to keep your laptop plugged in and charging, or should you take the battery out (and stick in the fridge, as one of the more bizarre suggestions goes) to prolong its life? My rule of thumb is: at home, plug in; on the road, chill out and use the battery for what it was designed to do.

Like us, all batteries will eventually die; the question is how they lived, and what they did while they were alive. You can even repack and revive their dead cells, which is more than you can say for their owners.

T3 Select Opinion for August 2007


THE MINUTE Beng told me she’d lost her digital camera, I blew my top—as anyone who invested $250 in a point-and-shoot naturally would—and there was much tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth (mine, not hers) before I simmered down and tried to figure out what to do next. Beng’s an art conservator, and she can’t do without a camera—preferably one that takes wide-angle pictures, to accommodate the large paintings and murals she restores.

Slowly but surely, the answer dawned on me: Why not give her my year-old Panasonic Lumix (yes, the one that takes 16:9 shots) and soothe my grief by upgrading to a newer, better digicam? As I started browsing the digicam forums, I began to realize what a great service the camera thief had done me, for here was a golden opportunity to do something noble (ie, yield my prized and trusty Leica-lensed Lumix to my wife) while exploring the bleeding edge of digital rangefinder photography. And what about the dough I lost? Well, let’s just imagine that the camera thief had a sick daughter in the hospital whose eyes brightened up when she saw the steaming noodles her Itay brought her….

So what did I find? After much deliberation (or three hours of surfing, the upper limit of my impatience when I’m afflicted by upgraditis), I settled on the Canon PowerShot G7—a small black brick whose looks and heft might remind you of the old SLRs without the lens, except that this one sports the equivalent of a 35-210 mm optical zoom. From what I saw, the image quality is tack-sharp; image stabilization, a rainbow of shooting modes, and the option of external flash also helped me make up my mind. The price (make that the Quiapo street price) wasn’t all that bad, although it meant standing at the ATM for a few minutes while the people in the queue wondered if I was going to leave them anything in the dispenser.

Next to our computers and phones, cameras vie with music players in our digital fantasies (an iPod-compatible BMW would be nice, but I’ve learned to limit my fantasies to things I can actually order with my credit card). Camera technology has also developed so fast that I’ve just realized how, in just five years since I got my first 2-megapixel Canon Ixus V in 2002, I’ve moved up to a 10-megapixel G7. That’s 2 megapixels a year that I hope to keep gaining—hopefully without having to lose another camera.

T3 Select Opinion for July 2007


I'VE OFTEN wondered if we truly make our machines work for us, or if, in fact, we work our butts off for our machines—meaning, we’ll beg, steal, or borrow just to get our grimy paws on that new 20-megapixel digicam or that 80-gig iPhone. Of course, those gadgets haven’t even been invented yet, but trust me, they will be, sooner than we think. And when they are, you can bet your sweet fanny that you and I will be there at XYZ Handheld Heaven or ABC Gizmos Galore, plunking the plastic down faster than you can say “Zero interest!”

I found myself in this situation a few weeks ago when—after having sworn on my grandmother’s grave that I wasn’t going to switch phones until the arrival of the Redeemer—er, the iPhone—I stumbled (OK, so I marched) into a Nokia shop in SM North and walked out with a gleaming new E61i. My secondary excuse was that my SE M600i had suffered a bad bump—and indeed it had, knocking the stylus out of its sheath and refusing to lock it back in place, but it was nothing a 50-peso tube of epoxy couldn’t have fixed (and I fixed it, too—after getting the Nokia).

Note that I said ‘secondary’ excuse, because my primary one was that I was, well, depressed. And why was I depressed? It’s nobody’s business, but I’ll give you a clue: I couldn’t nail my SE M600i stylus back into its slot. (To this, add the sordid state of Philippine politics, a creeping dysfunction down below, and the uncertainty of an afterlife.)

Depression can be a wonderful thing—at least for retailers, if not for you. It makes you dizzy, it clouds your judgment, and it gives you every reason to seek relief in whatever form—which usually means some bleeping, blinking gadget costing two months’ pay. I can certify that when I walked into that phone store and saw the E61i, a heavy gray cloud seemed to lift from deep within my spirits, replaced by the radiant glow of a 320 X 240 pixel screen. As my fingers caressed the silken keys, I felt so euphoric that I almost didn’t feel the effort of affixing my signature to a credit card slip that wafted before my eyes.

I hate it that we “digiots,” as I’ve sometimes called our kind, can be so predictable. But would we have it otherwise?

(Photo courtesy of mobiletechreview.com)

T3 Select Opinion for May 2007


I DON'T know how many of you 20-somethings and 30-somethings out there have had to deal with this, but speaking as a 50-something—that’s right, an over-aged geek—I’ve found myself more than once having to choose between a new smartphone and a new, uh, fridge.

Actually, it was a choice between the smartphone and my wife, whom I would’ve lost if I hadn’t gotten the fridge.

But what was interesting was the realization that women don’t buy appliances (let’s call them home-tech devices) the way we gadget-crazy men do. (In my case, I’d go to a site like dealmac.com for the latest offers and current prices, then to the manufacturer’s site for the full specs, then to users’ groups for the reviews, then to eBay or Amazon to order the thing itself.)

No—women go around appliance centers in large malls (toting you along, of course, for your credit card) sizing up two dozen fridges, opening and shutting fridge doors 20 times like they hadn’t been through any stress tests in the factory, bending and leaning over to check out the minutiae of crispers and ice cube trays. My wife could’ve spared herself and me the trouble by Googling half a dozen websites for the specs of her ideal fridge and ordering one with a click of the mouse, but she just had to eyeball the silver hulk we eventually went home with, like a girl screening a posse of suitors before saying yes to The One.

Maybe I can put that down to the palpable shortage of glossy, high-tech magazines featuring the latest in fridges, washers, dryers, ovens, and coffeemakers. (I’m sure there are such edifying journals somewhere at some checkout counter or unisex salon; I’ve just been going to the wrong places.)

And maybe that’s good. Without meaning to suggest that only women buy fridges with a lover’s passion, I’m dead certain that if a T3 for such home-tech devices were to be published with male hunks on the cover toting the latest in toasters, and if our spouses and mates were anything like us guys, then we’ll be seeing a new fridge in the kitchen (and a new item on our zero-interest payables) every six months—in sleek anodized aluminum, with a DVD player on the side and programmable ice cube dispensers to boot.

T3 Select Opinion for April 2007


Unknown to most of you—and as if i I had all the time in the word—I started a short monthly column for T3 Magazine Philippines a couple of months ago. This is a mag for gadget freaks like me, and I couldn't say no when now-T3-bossman and former student Ed Geronia asked me to come on board with a 400-word take every issue on any topic of my choice under the "Select Opinion" tag. I'm posting this just now because my contract specifies that I can't blog the piece until it's been in print for a while. So here goes:


IT WAS a fraternity brother—now you know why frats were invented—who cued me in to the fact that there were certain websites out there that catered to videos of a special sort: so-called “scandals” that showed people performing, uhm, physically if not spiritually gratifying acts on their partners and on themselves.

Inflamed with a journalistic sense of mission (what else could it have been?), I fired up my browser, Googled these “scandals”, and spent the next six hours investigating the delights—I mean the depths—of human depravity, wondering how such a formidable collection of indiscretions could have been amassed.

The answer, of course, is the cellphone—or, to be more accurate, the cameraphone—which now comes standard with any city dweller between 25 and 55. As is often the case, the technology itself is pretty straightforward: take any phone, stick a camera on one side (or both), and click away. Now, to be fair to the inventors of this technology, I’m sure they had spectacular sunsets, distant mountains, and kids’ birthdays in mind when they dreamed this up. At worst, they might’ve thought of a few sneaky shots of a business competitor’s new merchandise—or, okay, of that pretty face across the restaurant.

Well, I didn’t see a single sunset in any of those “scandal” pics or videos. There were quite a few pretty faces—but they weren’t nibbling on salads or dessert, either. Everyone was busy having, uhm, the main course.

As far as I could tell, no one was being forced to do something against his or her will. However, you had to wonder how many of these “performers” knew where their photogenic passions were going to end—such as a foot away from my myopic eyes.

This led me to wonder further if “kiss and show” had become the rule of the hour. Let’s not even bring up such apparently outdated notions as gallantry and chivalry; these guys were out to put on a show of their girlfriends—and a show was what we got. Or am I just being a fuddy-duddy, and neglecting the possibility that we’ve entered the Era of Exhibitionism—something that will work even better with 3G, HSDPA, and all that jazz?

“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” they like to say in, well, Vegas. Not anymore, thanks to the cellphone which used to be good for scoring dates, and now works even better for dating scores.